Litter of titanic proportions
The massive plastic tide in the sea is just the tip of the environmental iceberg
EVERY litre of seawater off Durban’s harbour contains about 340 pieces of microplastics, according to a marine biologist in the city.
Dr Deborah Robertson-Andersson, whose work focuses on how marine life is affected by it, said Durban ranked “very poorly” in the world and contributed vastly to plastic going out into the oceans which, by 2050, is expected to have more plastic in it than fish.
The Durban Eddy – an oceanographic term for a body of water off the coast that moves up and down the Agulhas current and attracts high biological activity – is of grave concern.
“Our work shows that fish in the eddy have more plastic in their stomachs than those off Durban harbour,” said Robertson-Andersson, a senior lecturer in marine biology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Life Sciences.
She said the microplastics – less than 5mm in size – were generally not visible and made up most of the unseen plastic that was underwater, unlike ubiquitous floating bottles.
“It’s the iceberg principle,”she said, adding that there was little one could do about it once it was in the open sea. “Plastic containers break up quickly due to exposure to the sun, which makes them brittle and start to break up, and then there’s the wave action.”
The harbour is the worst place for plastic pollution because a substantial amount comes down rivers and streams, Robertson-Andersson said.
“The more human activity along a river, the greater the problem.
“It decreases from Durban, both in a northerly and a southerly direction (up and down the coast),” Robertson-Andersson said.
Encouraging the discharge of plastic into the ocean is the high number of estuaries, which exist because of the local climate.
Plastic out at sea is difficult to gather. The solution therefore lies in prevention – stopping the plastic from entering the ocean in the first place, she said.
Last month UKZN’s School of Life Sciences started a laboratory exercise to examine how much was being washed down the uMhlangane, which starts at Inanda and passes Phoenix, Ntuzuma and KwaMashu “to get real data”, said Robertson-Andersson.
“River mechanic” Baart Fokkens has constructed a boom from a plastic pipe that sits on the surface of the water and guides floating garbage towards the bank for collection for the university. It’s similar to an apparatus he used to get rid of alien water hyacinth that was a pest to canoeists, in the Mngeni River, which the uMhlangane flows into.
“It will trap 80 percent of the floating litter,”said Fokkens, who is the environmental manager of the Dusi Umgeni Conservation Trust.
On any ordinary day, litter collection teams travel up the river to collect plastic garbage on the banks and in the water, bag it and send it off for recycling.
Fokkens hopes the eThekwini Municipality will adopt the plan and apply it to other rivers to compliment many other efforts to reduce the litter hazard, both in the streams and in the sea.
Durban has 17 rivers and estuaries in the metropolitan area.
Fokkens’s boom functions for rainfalls up to 20mm over 24 hours. When it exceeds that, it simply dislodges at one end but remains fixed to its attachment on the opposite bank.
When the water is that high, “Mother Earth comes down the river,” Fokkens said, pointing at an uprooted tree lodged on a weir. Wood, dead dogs, foam insulation from the inside of fridges and thousands of shoes often join the load.
Fokkens said the city would benefit from this system in that it would mean less waste needed to be transported around and landfill sites would not fill up so quickly.
The city has, meanwhile, called on residents to change their behaviour on waste management.
“The blatant disregard for the environment and littering appears to be the cause of the problem,” said city spokeswoman Tozi Mthethwa.
“While the city makes every effort to keep our coastline clean, there is no amount of cleaning and policing that can deal with litter if we, as residents, do not change our behaviour on waste management.”
Fokkens added that many people had the perception that littering created jobs, which he called absurd.
“It’s like saying breaking a leg is a good idea because it gives a surgeon work, or smashing a car window gives work to a repair person.”
While many people are involved in litter collection, such jobs created by increased littering were “false jobs”, he said.
Recently, South African adventurer Riaan Manser told The Independent on Saturday that plastic pollution proved a massive obstacle on his recent record-breaking feat across half the Pacific Ocean, from California to Hawaii.
“We could see only 10m every side of us and for two or three weeks, every 10 to 15 seconds on either side was a chunk of plastic – massive crates,” he said.